OLD Grandfather Iden always dined alone in the parlour, with his
housekeeper to wait on him; they were just bringing in his food. The
family and visitors had their meals in a separate and much more
comfortable apartment in another part of the house, which was large.
Sometimes, as a great favour and special mark of approval, the old Pacha
would invite you to eat with him.
Amaryllis, though anxious to please him, hesitated, not only because of
the smoke, but because she knew he always had pork for dinner.
The rich juices of roast pork sustained his dry and withered frame--it
was a sort of Burgundy of flesh to him. As the good wine of Burgundy
fills the blood with iron and strengthens the body, so the rich juice of
the pork seemed to supply the oil necessary to keep the sinews supple
and to prevent the cartilages from stiffening.
The scientific people say that it is the ossification of the
cartilages--the stiffening of the firmer tissues--that in time
interferes with the processes of life. The hinges rust, as if your
tricycle had been left out in the rain for a week--and the delicate
watchwork of the human frame will not run.
If suppleness could only be maintained there is no reason why it should
not continue to work for a much longer period, for a hundred and fifty,
two hundred years--as long as you fancy. But nothing has yet been
devised to keep up the suppleness.
Grandfather Iden found the elixir of life in roast pork. The jokers of
Woolhorton--there are always jokers, very clever they think
themselves--considered the reason it suited him so well was because of
the pig-like obstinacy of his disposition.
Anything more contrary to common sense than for an old man of ninety to
feed on pork it would be hard to discover--so his friends said.
"Pork," said the physician, had down from London to see him on one
occasion, "pork is the first on the list of indigestible articles of
food. It takes from six to eight hours for the gastric apparatus to
reduce its fibres. The stomach becomes overloaded--acidity is the
result; nightmares, pains, and innumerable ills are the consequence. The
very worst thing Mr. Iden could eat."
"Hum," growled the family doctor, a native of Woolhorton, when he heard
of this. "Hum!" low in his throat, like an irate bulldog. If in the
least excited, like most other country folk, he used the provincial
pronunciation. "Hum! A' have lived twenty years on pork. Let'n yet it!"
Grandfather Iden intended to eat it, and did eat it six days out of
seven, not, of course, roast pork every dinner; sometimes boiled pork;
sometimes he baked it himself in the great oven. Now and then he varied
it with pig-meat--good old country meat, let me tell you, pig-meat--such
as spare-rib, griskin, blade-bone, and that mysterious morsel, the
"mouse." The chine he always sent over for Iden junior, who was a chine
eater--a true Homeric diner--and to make it even, Iden junior sent in
the best apples for sauce from his favourite russet trees. It was about
the only amenity that survived between father and son.
The pig-meat used to be delicious in the old house at home, before we
all went astray along the different paths of life; fresh from the pigs
fed and killed on the premises, nutty, and juicy to the palate. Much of
it is best done on a gridiron--here's heresy! A gridiron is flat
blasphemy to the modern school of scientific cookery. Scientific
fiddlestick! Nothing like a gridiron to set your lips watering.
But the "mouse,"--what was the "mouse?" The London butchers can't tell
me. It was a titbit. I suppose it still exists in pigs; but London folk
are so ignorant.
Grandfather Iden ate pig in every shape and form, that is, he mumbled
the juice out of it, and never complained of indigestion.
He was up at five o'clock every morning of his life, pottering about the
great oven with his baker's man. In summer if it was fine he went out at
six for a walk in the Pines--the promenade of Woolhorton.
"If you wants to get well," old Dr. Butler used to say, "you go for a
walk in the marning afore the aair have been braathed auver."
Before the air has been breathed over--inspired and re-inspired by human
crowds, while it retains the sweetness of the morning, like water fresh
from the spring; that was when it possessed its value, according to
bluff, gruff, rule-of-thumb old Butler. Depend upon it, there is
something in his dictum, too.
Amaryllis hesitated at the thought of the pork, for he often had it
underdone, so the old gentleman dismissed her in his most gracious
manner to dine with the rest.
She went down the corridor and took the seat placed for her. There was a
posy of primroses beside her napkin--posies of primroses all round the
table.
This raging old Tory of ninety years would give a shilling for the
earliest primrose the boys could find for him in the woods. Some one got
him a peacock's feather which had fallen from Beaconsfield's
favourites--a real Beaconsfield peacock-feather--which he had set in the
centre of a splendid screen of feathers that cost him twenty guineas.
The screen was upstairs in the great drawing-room near a bow window
which overlooked the fair.
People, you see, took pains to get him feathers and anything he fancied,
on account of the twenty thousand spade guineas in the iron box under
the bed.
His daughters, elderly, uninteresting married folk, begged him not to
keep a peacock's feather in the house--it would certainly bring
misfortune. The superstition was so firmly rooted in their minds that
they actually argued with him--_argued_ with Grandfather Iden!--pointing
out to him the fearful risk he was running. He puffed and coughed, and
grew red in the face--the great grey hat shook and tottered with anger;
not for all the Powers of Darkness would he have given up that feather.
The chairs round the large table were arranged in accordance with the
age of the occupants. There were twenty-one grandchildren, and a number
of aunts, uncles, and so on; a vague crowd that does not concern us. The
eldest sat at the head of the table, the next in age followed, and so
all round the dishes. This arrangement placed Amaryllis rather low
down--a long way from the top and fountain of honour--and highly
displeased her. She despised and disliked the whole vague crowd of her
relations, yet being there, she felt that she ought to have had a
position above them all. Her father--Iden, junior--was old Iden's only
son and natural heir; therefore her father's chair ought to have been at
the top of the table, and hers ought to have been next to his.
Instead of which, as her father was not the eldest, his seat was some
distance from the top, and hers again, was a long way from his.
All the other chairs were full, but her father's chair was empty.
The vague crowd were so immensely eager to pay their despicable court to
the Spade-Guinea Man, not one of them stopped away; the old, the young,
the lame, the paralytic, all found means to creep in to Grandfather
Iden's annual dinner. His only son and natural heir was alone absent.
How eagerly poor Amaryllis glanced from time to time at that empty
chair, hoping against hope that her dear father would come in at the
Psalms, or even at the sermon, and disappoint the venomous, avaricious
hearts of the enemies around her.
For well she knew how delighted they were to see his chair empty, as a
visible sign and token of the gulf between father and son, and well she
knew how diligently each laboured to deepen the misunderstanding and set
fuel to the flame of the quarrel. If the son were disinherited, consider
the enormous profit to the rest of them!
Grandfather Iden made no secret of the fact that he had not signed a
will. It was believed that several rough drafts had been sketched out
for him, but, in his own words--and he was no teller of falsehoods--he
had not decided on his will. If only they could persuade him to make his
will they might feel safe of something; but suppose he went off pop, all
in a moment, as these extraordinarily healthy old people are said to do,
and the most of his estate in land! Consider what a contingency--almost
all of it would go to his own son. Awful thing!
Amaryllis was aware how they all stared at her and quizzed her over and
over; her hair, her face, her form, but most of all her dress. They were
so poor at home she had not had a new dress this twelvemonth past; it
was true her dress was decent and comfortable, and she really looked
very nice in it to any man's eye; but a girl does not want a comfortable
dress, she wants something in the style of the day, and just
sufficiently advanced to make the women's eyes turn green with envy. It
is not the men's eyes; it is the women's eyes.
Amaryllis sat up very quiet and unconcerned, trying with all her might
to make them feel she was the Heiress, not only an only son's only
daughter, but the only son's only offspring--doubly the Heiress of
Grandfather Iden.
The old folk, curious in such matters, had prophesied so soon as she was
born that there would be no more children at Coombe Oaks, and so it fell
out. For it had been noticed in the course of generations, that in the
direct line of Iden when the first child was a daughter there were none
to follow. And further, that there never was but one Miss Iden at a
time.
If the Direct Line had a daughter first, they never had any more
children; consequently that daughter was the only Miss Iden.
If the Direct Line had a son, they never had a second son, though they
might have daughters; but then, in order that there should still be
only one Miss Iden, it always happened that the first died, or was
married early, before the second came into existence.
Such was the tradition of the Iden family; they had a long pedigree, the
Idens, reaching farther back than the genealogies of many a peer, and it
had been observed that this was the rule of their descent.
Amaryllis was the only Miss Iden, and the heiress, through her father,
of the Spade-Guinea Man. She tried to make them feel that she knew it
and felt it; that she was the Iden of the Idens. Her proud face--it was
a very proud face naturally--darkened a little, and grew still more
disdainful in its utter scorn and loathing of the vague crowd of
enemies.
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